Total Control (8 page)

The limo headed east away from Puget Sound. Jason looked out the tinted windows. The sky was overcast, and drops of rain splattered against the window. From his small pool of meteorological knowledge, Jason knew this weather was apparently a fixture for Seattle.

Within half an hour the limo had reached its destination: a collection of warehouse buildings that were accessed through an electric gate where a guam was stationed.

Jason looked around nervously, but said nothing. He had been told to expect unusual meeting conditions. They entered one of the warehouses through a metal overhead door that rose up as the limo approached. Exiting the vehicle, Jason could see the door closing.

The only light came from a daple of overhead light that were in need of cleaning. A set of stairs was at one end of the vast space. The men motioned for Jason to follow them. Jason looked around and felt an uneasiness start to wash over him. With an effort he brushed aside the feeling, took a deep breath and walked toward the stairs.

Up the stairs, they entered a narrow doorway to a small, windowless room. The driver waited outside. DePazza hit the light switch. Jason looked around. The furnishings consisted of one cam table, a couple of chairs and a battered file cabinet with holes rusted through.

Completely unknown to Jason, a surveillance camera, activated as soon as the light in the small room had been turned on, looked out from one of the file cabinet's rusty apertures, silently recording the even rs.

DePazza sat down in one of the chairs and motioned for Jason to do likewise. "Shouldn't be long now," DePazza said in a friendly tone. He flipped out a cigarette and offered another to Jason, who shook his head. "Just remember, Jason, don't do any talking. They only want what's in that briefcase. No need to complicate matters.

Okay?"

Jason nodded.

Before DePazza could light the menthol, there were three quick knocks on the door. Jason stood up, as did DePazza, who quickly put the cigarette away and opened the door. In the doorway stood a man, small in stature, his hair solid gray, his skin tanned and heavily wrinkled. Behind him were two men, dressed in cheap suits and wearing sunglasses despite the dim light. They both appeared to be in their late thirties.

The older man looked at DePazza, who in turn pointed to Jason.

The man looked at him with penetrating blue eyes. Jason suddenly realized he was drenched with perspiration, although the entire warehouse was unheated and the temperature must have been close to forty degrees.

Jason glanced at DePazza, who slowly nodded. Jason quickly handed over the leather briefcase. The man looked inside the bag, briefly perusing its contents, taking a minute to scrutinize one piece of paper in particular. The two others did likewise; smiles sprouted on their lips. The older man smiled broadly and then replaced the page, closed the briefcase and handed it to one of his men. The other one handed him a silver metal case, which he held briefly and then handed over to Jason. The case was secured by an electronic lock.

The sudden roar of the airplane overhead made them all jerk their heads upward. It seemed to be landing on the building. In a few moments it had passed by and the silence returned.

The elderly man smiled, turned, and the door quietly closed behind all three.

Jason slowly let out his breath.

They waited for a minute in silence and then DePazza opened the door and motioned for Jason to walk out. DePazza and the driver followed. The lights were turned out. The surveillance camera instantly shut off as the darkness returned.

Jason climbed back into the limo, holding tightly to the silver case. It was fairly heavy. He turned to DePazza.

"I didn't expect it to go exactly like that."

DePazza shrugged. "However you count it, though, it was a success."

"Yeah, but why couldn't I say anything?"

DePazza stared at him, faintly annoyed. "What would you have said, Jason?"

Jason finally shrugged.

"If I were you, I'd focus my attention on the contents of that." De-Pazza pointed at the briefcase.

Jason tried to open it but without success. He raised his eyebrows at his companion.

"When you get to where you'll be staying, you can open it. I'll tell you the code when we get there. Follow the instructions inside."

He added, "You won't be disappointed."

"But why Seattle?"

"It's doubtful you'd run into anyone you know here. Correct?"

DePazza's calm eyes rested on Jason's face.

"And you won't need me anymore. You're sure?"

DePazza almost smiled. "As sure as I've ever been about anything."

He shook Jason's hand.

DePazza leaned back in his seat. Jason put his seat belt on and felt something jab him in the side. He pulled his SkyWord pager from his belt and looked guiltily at it. What if it had been his wife calling earlier? He looked at the tiny screen and his face suddenly registered disbelief.

Flashing across the screen, the pager's headline feature told the story of a terrible tragedy: Western Airlines' early morning Flight 3223 from Washington to L.A. had crashed in the Virginia countryside; there were no survivors.

Jason Archer couldn't catch his breath. He tore open his black metal case and frantically reached for the phone inside.

DePazza's voice was sharp. "What the hell are you doing?"

Jason handed DePazza the pager. "My wife thinks I'm dead. Oh, Christ. That's why she was calling. Oh, my God." Jason's fingers fumbled over the phone case, trying to open it.

DePazza looked down at the pager. He read the digitized headline and the word "Shit" silently passed between his lips. Well, this would only accelerate the process slightly, he thought. He didn't like to deviate from the established plan, yet clearly he had no choice but to do exactly that. When he looked back up at Jason, his eyes were cold and deadly. One hand reached over and snatched the cellular phone from Jason's trembling hands. The other reached inside his jacket and reappeared, holding the compact shape of the deadly Glock directly at Jason's head.

Jason looked up and saw the gun.

"I'm afraid that you're not calling anybody." DePazza's eyes never left Jason's face.

Transfixed, Jason watched DePazza reach up to his face and rug at his skin. The elaborate disguise came off piece by piece. In another moment, next to Jason sat a blond-haired man in his early thirties with a long aquiline nose and fair skin. The eyes, though, remained the same blue and chilling. His real name, although he rarely used it, was Kenneth Scales. He was a certifiable sociopath, with a twist.

He took great pleasure in killing people, and reveled in the details that went into that terrible process. However, he never did it randomly.

And he never did it for free.

CHAPTER NINE

It had taken the better part of five hours to contain the fire, and in the end the flames retreated of their own accord after having consumed everything combustible within their long reach. The local authorities were grateful only that the conflagration had raged in an empty, secluded dirt field.

A National Transportation Safety Board "go-team," outfitted in their blue biohazard protective suits, were now slowly walking the outside perimeter of the crash while smoke billowed skyward and small pockets of obstinate flames were attacked by diligent teams of firefighters. The entire area had been cordoned off with orange and white street barricades behind which a number of anxious area residents stood and stared in the typical mixture of horrified disbelief and morbid interest. Columns of fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, dark green National Guard trucks and other emergency vehicles were stacked along both sides of the field. The EMTs stood next to their vehicles, hands in their pockets. Their services would not be needed other than as silent transports of whatever human remains, if any, could be extracted from the holocaust.

The mayor of the nearby rural Virginia town stood next to the farmer whose land had received this most terrible intrusion from above. Behind them, two Ford pickup trucks sported "I survived Pearl Harbor" license plates. And now, for the second time in their lives, their faces carried the horror of sudden, terrible and massive death.

"It's not a crash site. It's a goddamn crematory." The veteran NTSB investigator shook his head wearily, removed his cap emblazoned with the letters NTSB and wiped at his wrinkled brow with his other hand. George Kaplan was fifty-one years old with thinning, gray-edged hair that covered a wide head; he carried a small paunch on a five-foot-seven-inch frame. As a fighter pilot in Vietnam, then a commercial pilot for many years, he had joined the NTSB after a close friend had crashed a two-seater Piper into the side of a hill after a near miss with a 727 during a heavy fog. It was then that Kaplan decided he should do less flying and more work trying to prevent accidents.

George Kaplan was the designated investigator in charge and this was absolutely the last place in the world he wanted to be; but, unfortunately, one obvious place to seek preventive safety measures was at the scene of aircraft accidents. Every night members of the NTSB crash investigative "go-teams" went to bed hoping beyond hope that no one would have need of their services, praying that there would be no reason to travel to distant places, to pick through the pieces of yet another catastrophe.

As he scanned the crash area, Kaplan grimaced and shook his head again. Starkly absent was the usual trail of aircraft and body parts, luggage, clothing and the millions of other items that routinely would be discovered, sorted, cataloged, analyzed and papered until some conclusions could be found for why a 110-ton plane had fallen out of the skies. They had no eyewitnesses, because the crash occurred in the early morning and the cloud cover was low. It would have only been seconds between the time the plane exited the clouds and when it struck the earth.

Where the plane had penetrated the ground, nose first, there now existed a crater that later excavation would determine to be approximately thirty feet deep, or about one-fifth as long as the aircraft itself.

That fact alone was a terrifying testament to the force that had catapulted everyone on board into the hereafter with frightening ease. The entire fuselage, Kaplan figured, had collapsed like an accordion, fore and aft, and its fragments now rested in the depths of the impact crater. Not even the empennage, or tail assembly, was visible. To compound the problem, tons of dirt and rock were lying on top of the aircraft's remains.

The field and surrounding areas were peppered with bits of debris, but most of it was palm-sized, having been thrown off in the explosion when the aircraft hit the earth. Much of the plane and the passengers strapped inside would have disintegrated from the terrible weight and velocity of the impact and the igniting of the jet fuel, which would have caused another explosion bare seconds later, before thirty feet of dirt and rubble combined for an airtight mass grave.

What was left on the surface was unrecognizable as a jet aircraft.

It reminded Kaplan of the inexplicable 1991 Colorado Springs crash of a United Boeing 737. He had worked that disaster too as the aviation systems specialist. For the first time in the history of the NTSB, from its inception in 1967 as an independent federal agency, it had not been able to find probable cause for a plane crash. The "tin-kickers," as the NTSB investigators referred to themselves, had never gotten over that one. The similarity of the Pittsburgh crash of a USAir Boeing 737 in 1994 had only heightened their feelings of guilt. If they had solved Colorado, many of them felt, Pittsburgh might have been prevented. And now this.

George Kaplan looked at the now clear sky and his bewilderment grew. He was convinced the Colorado Springs crash had been caused, at least in part, by a freakish rotor cloud that had hit the aircraft on its final approach, a vulnerable moment for any jetliner. A rotor was a vortex of air generated about a horizontal axis by high winds over irregular terrain. In the case of United Airlines Flight 585, the irregular terrain was supplied by the mighty Rocky Mountains. But this was the East Coast. There were no Rocky Mountains here. While an abnormally severe rotor could conceivably have knocked a plane as large as an L500 out of the sky, Kaplan could not believe that was what had befallen Flight 3223. According to air traffic control, the L500 had started falling from its cruising altitude of thirty-five thousand feet and never looked back. No mountains in the United States were capable of throwing off the formation of a rotor that high. Indeed, the only mountains nearby were in the Shenandoah National Forest and were part of the relatively smallish Blue Ridge Mountain chain. They were all in the three- to four-thousand-foot range, more hills than mountains.

Then there was the altitude factor. Normally, the roll experienced by planes flying into a rotor or other freakish atmospheric condition is controlled by aileron application. At six miles up, the Western Airlines pilots would have had time to reestablish control. Kaplan was sure the dark side of Mother Nature had not torn the jet from the peaceful confines of the sky. But something else clearly had.

His team would shortly return to their hotel, where an organizational meeting would be held. Initially, on-scene investigative groups would be formed for structures, systems, survival factors, power plants, weather and air-traffic control. Later, units would be assembled to evaluate aircraft performance, to analyze the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, crew performance, sound spectrum, maintenance records and metallurgical examinations. It was a slow, tedious and oftentimes heart-wrenching process, but Kaplan would not leave until he had examined every atom of what had recently been a state-of-the-art jetliner and almost two hundred very much alive human beings. He swore to himself that probable cause would not escape him this time.

Kaplan slowly walked toward his rental car. An early spring would come to the dirt field: soon, red flags would bloom everywhere, tiny beacons signifying the location of remnants of the flight.